It may succeed at doing so where MS Office and Open Office fail to salvage text/data. It can also attempt to recover formatting for just Open Office files. At this time unfortunately there is no facility for recovering anything but basic formatting for Microsoft Office files through the previously mentioned text extractions.

The program can be used as a viewer and basic editor of text from healthy MS Office and Open Office files without having MS Office or Open Office installed.

Finally the program has an extensive 'Alternatives' menu which lists other free and commercial methods for recovering your office files. This includes a free coupon 'S2SERVICES' for the often effective Recoveronix File Repair service a $39 value.

The text extraction is accomplished with the use of the command line application, SILVERCODERS DocToText. Corrupt Office File Salvager also uses command line tools from the CMD Corrupt OfficeOpen2txt, The Chicago and the Apache Tika Projects. The reconstructed version of the Open Office file is accomplished by unzipping the Open Office file with the somewhat zip corruption immune 7zip unzipper. Once unzipped, the manifest/manifest.xml file is replaced with a greatly simplified version as described here: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=57600.

If this application doesn't work for Open Office files, there are other things worth trying as summarized here: http://s2services.com/open_office.htm. If it doesn't work for Microsoft Word files, try here: http://s2services.com/word_repair.htm. If it doesn't work for Excel files look at other alternative steps here: http://s2services.com/excel.htm.